


my darling, let's breathe a while

by a_verysmallviolet



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Birthday, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Homesickness, Languages, Worldbuilding, culture clash, girls comforting girls, things lost in translation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-10
Updated: 2017-04-10
Packaged: 2018-10-17 04:14:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10586214
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_verysmallviolet/pseuds/a_verysmallviolet
Summary: Pidge explains birthdays to Allura, but some things get lost in translation. Then again, some things are universal.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [EmberGlows](https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmberGlows/gifts).



> Happy birthday, dear heart ^-^

For all intents and purposes, being thrown through a wormhole and then planet-hopping through the galaxy should make it near impossible to keep track of the passage of time on Earth. There’s the matter of various planet rotational speeds, the difficulty of measuring time in space transit, and, oh yes – _wormholes_. Tricky little devils.

Then again, for all intents and purposes, Pidge is not your average mathematician.

She’s crouching now in her usual haunt at the edge of the Castle, legs drawn up and chin resting on her knees, looking at everything and nothing in particular. This new planet they’re on has a sharp, faintly tangy scent in the air, like crushed juniper berries. The sky is perpetually steel-gray, the wind bracing as a plunge into a mountain pool. Lance and Hunk had complained profusely about the cold, but Pidge likes it. It reminds her of visits to her grandparents, listening to her mom talk Norwegian with them and making out every other word, slurping up her grandmother’s _fårikål_ stew. If she closes her eyes, it feels like her childhood.

Then she looks up, at the immense rings arcing silently through the sky, and feels a cold that has nothing to do with the wind.

Some days the homesickness is bearable. Some days it comes stabbing with a fury, and having a reason to explain it does nothing to help.

“Pidge?”

Pidge barely keeps from starting with surprise. Allura’s surprisingly light-footed at the best of times, but she still doesn’t want the princess to think she’s some jumpy, untested kid.

“Oh – hey, Allura.”

Allura sits without asking, leaning against one of the support pillars. She isn’t wearing any extra layers over her usual gown, but doesn’t seem to feel the cold.

“What’s wrong, Pidge?”

Pidge’s head snaps up. “Nothing,” she says – too quickly.

Allura grimaces at her. “You’ve been saying ‘nothing’ for the last week,” the princess points out. “And according to Lance and Hunk, the last time you kept doing that, it was because you were hacking into Galra communications and teaching yourself an alien language.”

“It wasn’t _that_ hard to learn,” Pidge protests. “Once I ran an algorithm to figure out the most common symbols in their language and transliterated a few samples, it was easy. Galra grammar is _nothing_ compared to fourth-grade spelling bees.”

Allura’s face is a study. “…Yes. Anyway.” She clears her throat. “The point is, ‘nothing’ for you usually _is_ something. It isn’t…it doesn’t reflect on your age, or the fact that you’re a girl, if you have a problem you want to talk about.”

Pidge rubs the back of her head uncomfortably. “It’s…this time, it’s not such a big deal as that.”

“But it _is_ something, then?”

… Damn it. She should have known better than to try to deceive someone from a race of diplomats.

Pidge is about to brazen her way out through it anyway and say she can handle it herself, but Allura’s face stops her. There is no pity or condescension in it – just concern. It’s the way one comrade might look at another. The hard little knot of misery inside Pidge’s chest loosens, just a little.

“It…my birthday was a week ago, and no one noticed.” She tries to laugh. “I mean, I know it’s not really a big deal, there’s been so much going on. But I just sort of…yeah.”

Allura tilts her head.

“What’s a birthday?”

“Oh! It’s an Earth thing – at least I _think_ it really is an Earth thing, most cultures have something like it – where you mark the day you were born and celebrate it with a party and cake and candles and all your…all your family and friends with you…”

Pidge bites her lip. She can hear herself – hear her small, childishly wistful voice – and she hates it.

_I’m not a child, I’m a paladin of Voltron!_ That was what she’d boasted to the Galra infiltrator in the control room, the one that fell. And yet here she is on the verge of tears over a birthday party.

But Allura’s scooting closer on the ledge beside her, legs drawn up and chin resting on her knees.

“I think we have the same thing, actually,” the princess comments. “Well. Almost the same thing anyway. The juniberry flowers…you _do_ have flowers on your planet, right?” She tilts a quizzical look at Pidge, who laughs.

“Yes, we definitely do!”

Allura smiles too. “Oh in that case it’ll be easier to explain.” Despite that, she takes a moment to chew her lip and curl a strand of hair around her finger, plainly figuring out how to start. Then she says, “In Altea, people don’t keep track of the exact day you’re born. What we do instead is remember the plants that were in season then, and pick one in particular to be yours. After that, every year when that plant flowers again, that’s your flowering too. You get special treatment for as long as it’s in season, and your presents are supposed to be themed around that flower. Sometimes people take the theme seriously, and sometimes…” She giggles suddenly. “Sometimes it’s a joke. One year my father told me he was giving me a poem for my flowering. It turned out to be a bracelet with seven beads in different colors, because of the rhyme – seven and juniberry!” She laughs out loud. “It was such an awful joke, I couldn’t look him in the face for days. I was barely sixty then.”

She laughs again. Pidge doesn’t quite know what to say. She’d known that Alteans aged differently, but this casual reference is still shocking. Her stomach coils in the sickening feeling she always has when she misses some vital bit of information, slides behind.

Allura sobers quickly when she notices Pidge’s silence. A thin line appears between her brows, and her shoulders slump ever so slightly. “I…I guess that didn’t translate so well through the chip, does it?”

Pidge shakes her head. “It kinda makes sense though. Even on Earth it’s almost impossible to translate jokes between languages.” So there _is_ an Altean translator chip somewhere. Pidge tucks that bit of information away. She’d suspected as much; the odds of an alien speaking English were too remote, especially when she’d been asleep for millennia before English was even invented. The chip must be pretty sophisticated – even after so much time together, she still hadn’t noticed any weird pauses or glitches in it.

Then she feels a sudden twinge of guilt. It feels somehow unfair to call Allura alien, even in her own mind. She _shouldn’t_ think of her like that. Allura is a friend.

Allura looks flabbergasted for reasons of her own. “I didn’t know Earth had different species.”

Pidge blinks. “Of course we do. We’ve got…geez, I don’t even know _how many_ – mammals and reptiles and birds and insects, there must be at least a few thousand of just _those_ …”

“Was your Garrison just for humans then? Because otherwise it seems odd that all five paladins would be human – “

“Why would that be odd?”

“You just said you have thousands of species. And Shiro told me that your planet was still searching for life on other planets, you hadn’t found them yet.”

“Yeah, but the other Earth species are all animals. Humans are the only ones capable of advanced thought and space flight.”

Allura’s brow furrows. “But – you said your planet needed to translate between languages. Why -?”

The lightbulb goes off in Pidge’s head. She almost crows in triumph. “Different _human_ languages, Allura!”

Allura’s jaw drops. “Humans have _more_ than one language?”

“Alteans only have _one?_ ”

They both stare at each other for a moment, shock mirrored on their faces. Allura recovers first.

“I – well. I must…I suppose I must rethink my picture of your planet now.” She shakes her head. “If there are so many languages on your planet, how is it you all speak the same one?”

“Oh, well, _that’s_ a whole different kettle of fish – er, that’s something else entirely.” Pidge rubs the back of her head embarrassedly. “I guess that was another example of things getting lost in translation, heh. The ‘kettle of fish’ thing and…that whole discussion.”

“Yes, I suppose…”

They’re both quiet a moment. Pidge’s mind is whirring. Now that she thinks of it, the circumstances of Voltron’s formation are incredible. Out of all the species and all the planets in the universe – out of all the billions of humans on Earth alone – five teenagers from the same garrison were the ones chosen. The odds are staggering.

“It makes you think, doesn’t it?”

Pidge gives a start. Is it possible Allura had been thinking along the same lines? Cautiously, she asks, “What does?”

Allura sighs quietly. “The idea that…words are being translated, but ideas aren’t. The idea of us always talking past each other and never realizing.” She gives a half-hearted chuckle. “Before, I was always confused when you paladins spoke about Earth. I’d think to myself, ‘ _What is with them and dirt_?’

When you speak, any of you, I always hear your words in Altean. So I could keep telling myself – my home language isn’t gone. But…”

She trails off. Pidge has no idea what to say, so she spends a moment just looking at her: Allura’s bowed head, her hands clenched white on the platform edge.

An alien millennia old. Someone so far removed from Earth that they would ask in all seriousness, “Your planet _does_ have flowers, right?”

A girl who looks only a little older than Pidge is, mourning her entire people.

How horribly alone she must feel.

Pidge says quietly, “You know, I think…I think my family, at least, might have something like your flowering.”

She isn’t sure where she’s going with this. She just wants to _find_ some connection between them, help Allura discover some thread of her culture that isn’t completely lost.

Allura turns her head and looks at her, and there is something desperate in her eyes.

“When I was born, my father brought my mother and me irises,” Pidge says. Her vision blurs a moment; she keeps going. “That’s my middle name: Iris. My nursery was painted lilac to match. I loved the color as a kid. Even when I got too old for – for purple stuffed animals, or whatever, the presents I got would still be wrapped in purple paper, or have purple ribbon. I used to think it was so amazing to have a name I could see and touch again every spring.”

When Matt left for Garrison, she’d worn her favorite purple dress. They’d taken their picture together for that. For a second time, her vision swims with tears.

Allura’s own voice is husky when she says, “Thank you.”

She doesn’t say she’s sorry for Pidge’s loss, or move to hug her. For that, Pidge is grateful. Sometimes the sheer knowledge that you are understood, that you are not alone, is enough. Anything else would bring pain.

Pidge draws in a deep, deep breath, and lets it out.

“Allura…” she starts. “Could you…could you teach me Altean sometime? I know we have the translator chip, but…I want to know it. For real. It…to me it seems like something worth knowing.”

Never, never has Pidge seen Allura like this. In the weeks they’ve been together, she has seen the princess bold, despondent, joyful, hopeful with a fiercely resolute hope. But never has she seen this soft, trembling smile, this sudden sheen of tears.

“Yes,” Allura says quietly. “I would like that too.”

She stoops, suddenly, and kisses Pidge on both cheeks, just where the Altean markings would be if she had them.

“And _you_ are someone worth knowing,” she says.

A lump rises to Pidge’s throat. If she was Shiro, or Hunk, or Lance, she would know the perfect words of comfort and strength to give back to Allura. If she was Keith, she would know how to say everything with her eyes alone.

She’s just a fourteen-year-old kid with knowledge and a thirst for knowledge.

She clears her throat and says, “Could you teach me something in Altean right now?”

And Allura – Allura understands. She can see it in her eyes.

“What would you like to learn?” she asks.

“Teach me to say…” Pidge looks her right in the eyes. “Teach me to say, ‘ _I am a paladin of Voltron. I am a defender of the universe.’”_

The same slow, tremulous smile crosses Allura’s face. She closes her eyes, and Pidge _feels_ the shift in the air as the Altean magic powering the chip switches off.

Without opening her eyes, Allura speaks. Slowly once, a pause, and then the same slow phrase repeated.

Pidge listens intently, committing the sounds to memory. The words sound lilting, as though Allura is on the very verge of singing.

An entire language of song; a planet filled with the heady color and scent of blossoms. How beautiful it must have been.

A gift that, in giving, itself is a gift to the one that gives as well.

A sense of a culture ten thousand years ago. A gift of history. A gift of hope.

Allura opens her eyes and smiles at Pidge.

Pidge pushes her glasses up her nose, squares her shoulders, and speaks.

“ _I am a paladin of Voltron. I am a defender of the universe.”_


End file.
